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1979 (14 YEARS OLD)
I’d Never Had A Baby To Leave Me, But Still…

I’d Never Had A Baby To Leave Me, But Still…

1979 (14 YEARS OLD)2 months ago

1979 - 14 Years Old

Elvis was my gateway drug into music.

And for the six or so months after he died (you can read about that in the post Eating Chips While Elvis Died), I had been planning to buy my first record(s).

Christmas always killed me financially, as I usually spent everything on presents that I had saved from my paper route and the coins I would get from my nana or from running errands for Mrs. Bowley. Oh, and the criminally stingy pocket money I got from my parents.

It would be a long several more months before I hit the jackpot.

In addition to scraping together the money to buy my first single (or two, if I were lucky), extensive and meticulous research was also involved. So by the time the Christmas holidays were over, I made sure that I had seen every Elvis film.

In Britain at the time, we were rewarded with a viewing smorgasbord for the previous 50 weeks of watching the news, the occasional film, and 2-hour documentaries about the different varieties of moss that grew in Sherwood Forest.

And all of the holidays’ viewing pleasure would be presented in hefty 2-week holiday editions of the Radio Times (for BBC One and Two) and the TV Times (for ITV).

During this fortnight of bliss, we were offered Christmas specials from all of the popular TV shows, Christmas variety shows, and films (The Bridge Over The River Kwai and The Miracle On 34th St. were always on the rotation). Even BBC-2 would show 90-minute documentaries about Medieval Christmas puddings.

Magic was in the air.

And they would also show all of the Elvis films (and all of the Beatles films, too, but I wasn’t concerned with that at that point). So I arranged my holidays to make sure I saw all 33. Sometimes on the living room TV if my parents were off doing something, and sometimes (usually) on the small black and white TV they had in their bedroom.

I made extensive notes on a yellow legal pad. It was my first real research. And fortunately, I could read my handwriting back then.

I eventually came to the conclusion that I liked the early Elvis the best. More specifically, Jailhouse Rock. So I decided that’s what I would buy.

By January, I had scrounged together about £1.50. That would be enough to buy a couple of singles (45s). Hopefully. Definitely one, but I was praying for some sort of a post-Christmas miracle.

So at the end of January, I marched into Osborne’s on Parson Street, with about 20 coins playing the rhytmn section in my pocket.

It was a great record store. It was massive and, consequently, had something for everyone. It even had listening booths, where one of the employees would put on a disk, and you could listen to the single or album “before purchasing.”

It was all LPs and singles, some music posters, and record cleaning products. Everyone there was interested in one thing: music.

It wasn’t like the Woolworth’s record section where you were surrounded by people buying hemorrhoid cream or garden hoses.

It was pure.

Over time, I would learn of the perfect ratio of buying to browse listening that marked you as a client rather than a scrounger. And being known as a client often came with access to the listening booths.

Later, my friends and I would become the sort of hipster music snobs who wouldn’t shop in a record store that also carried The Greatest Hits Of Englebert Humperdink.

But that was in the future. At that point, Osborne’s was where it was at.

I asked one of the guys if I could listen to the Jailhouse Rock 45. I made the coins casually jingle in my pocket to show him that I wasn’t dicking around. He pointed me to a listening booth.

I sat there with the headphones on, and the that magical first guitar lick slapped me around my head

It was the dog’s bollocks.

Then I asked him to play the ‘B’ side, some track called Heartbreak Hotel that I had never even heard of before. He looked like he was going to tell me to bugger off, so I bought the record (at this time, I already knew that I was 10p short of being able to buy two).

It blew my mind.

It was the most fantastic thing I had ever heard.

It spoke to me, even though I had never had my heart broken, wasn’t lonely, and, growing up in England, wasn’t that keen on crying about anything. But it spoke to me.

A week later, I had gotten my paper-delivery money, and I went back and bought a second Elvis 45 (Hound Dog/All Shook Up).

Being a slow day, and the seller remembering me, he let me sit there for about 30 minutes in the listening booth.

It was my first official rite of passage. One of those moments that would unalterably change my life, like finally being served a pint instead of being kicked out of the pub, my first dance with a girl, my first kiss, finding the first girl stupid enough to have sex with me, or lurching through the neigbourhood trying to learn how to shift gears in my MG Midget, while my sister Bev called me a daft sod through her tears of laughter.

But those events were in the future.

And at 14, I was happy enough with my two singles.